Man held after scene at theatre Mary Poppins a sweet treat
Show will sweep away summer doldrums
A South Florida man faces disorderly conduct charges after a disturbance at a theatre showing the Batman movie The Dark Knight Rises. Miami Beach police say more than 100 moviegoers fled early Tuesday after David Escamillo yelled “This is it!” during the film. He was held by movie patrons until police arrived.
SREVIEW
Mary Poppins plays the Jubilee Auditorium through Sunday. Tickets at ticketmaster.ca. ½ out of five. he brings out the little kid in everyone, even her bottomline banker of a boss. She doesn’t need to ride the bus to work because she can fly. When children wreak havoc on the kitchen, she transforms it back into a smooth-running operation.
Mary Poppins is the nanny from heaven.
She’s also the title character (well-played by Rachel Wallace) of one of the most beloved — for a certain generation — characters of all time, and now the star of a Disney musical that opened Tuesday night at the Jubilee. (Or, as she was explained to the nineyear-old in our house, “an old school Nanny McPhee.”)
Any way you cut it, Mary’s a pop culture icon, in a show filled with instantly recognizable and irresistible songs such as Chim Chim Cher-ee, Jolly Holiday, A Spoonful of Sugar, Feed the Birds and Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious (which my dad not only used to sing to us when we were kids, but also spelled.)
Lucky thing, too — all those famous tunes keep you humming even as this nearly three-hourlong show meanders along, dropping in plot points as reluctantly as George Banks (Michael Dean Morgan, suitably uptight), the emotionally remote father of Jane and Michael Banks, displays any affection towards his family.
Mary is the catalyst for the family’s transformation, from just another striving British family that has forgotten, despite the best efforts of their children, how to live life, into a true family.
Assisted in her mission to bring a little rainbow into the rainy world of London in the early 20th-century by Bert (a wonderful Con O’Shea-Creal), a cheerful Cockney chimney sweep who paints a little, Mary not only manages to keep George and Winifred’s (Elizabeth Broadhurst) kids in order, but also reminds George what really matters when he ends up suspended from work for making questionable loans. (This is a period piece. Nowadays, he would have earned an eight-figure bonus.)
Wallace’s Mary, who looks almost more like the lady of the house than the lady of the house does, seems perfect in every way — almost too perfect, truth be told — but is ably assisted in her effort to bring magic into this family’s lives by a number of spectacular set designs (by Bob Crowley) that are almost as memorable as those show tunes Wallace performs beautifully.
As Jane and Michael, the unruly children who terrorize their nannies, (Marissa Ackerman and Zach Timson) behave with scarcely more unruliness than most kids, and without any real malice at all. All they want is for their parents to acknowledge their existence — which does leave you scratching your head a bit about them being nanny-killers, but then along comes another classic song (by Richard and Robert Sherman) to take your mind off the slack storytelling.
And while the bulk of the activity is set around the adventures of Mary and her family, Mary Poppins really soars whenever Bert and his lovable band of chimney sweeps takes the stage.
Attired in tweeds and twill caps, the chorus demonstrates that the magic of life doesn’t come accompanied by a price tag. O’Shea-Creal’s Bert — delivering his lines in a Cockney accent that Dick Van Dyke, who played Bert in the 1964 film, would envy — is the one character that really illuminates the magic that Mary Poppins is all about.
In point of fact, Mary Poppins would have truly made me believe in magic if Bert’s social and economic life experienced the sort of transformation banker George’s life does, but even in a Disney show, there’s only so much magic to go around.
As Mary sings Anything Can Happen If You Let It — that’s Disney’s story and they’re sticking to it — it all seems more of a stretch than ever to believe. Maybe that’s just another way of saying we all need to get back in better touch with our inner Mary Poppins.